Jonathan Todd

The current Progress magazine contains my answer to the question ‘what next for New Labour?’

New Labour was never a year zero but an embrace of proud Labour traditions. It isn’t a body of doctrine but a cast of mind as revisionist as Tony Crosland in unsentimentally separating core values (ends) and policy instruments (means). It is as hard-headed as Ernest Bevin in always seeking to be grounded in lived realities, not abstract theories, and in recognising that our core values will be best realised within these lived realities with Labour in power.

It is a governmental philosophy in both always seeking to have Labour in office and when holding office to exercise power not in pursuit of sectional interests but in the best interests of the whole country. This objectivity in governance isn’t at the exclusion of core values but the embodiment of these values: equality and fairness for all people irrespective of their class, gender, race, religion, sexuality or where they live.       

New Labour’s future must be about recovering the best of its past, which is deeply rooted in the party. As when the party has previously found itself in opposition we now need what New Labour should offer: clarity of values, innovation in our means, immersion in our communities and absolute focus on winning at the next election. Lack of these things has previously kept Labour in opposition for longer than it should have been. New Labour’s task is to avoid repeating this fate.

This requires certainty about our values. Greater justice means a country more equal not just in income but also in wealth, health, power, safety and opportunities to be active citizens and to make the most of all talents and aspirations.

While these ends are timeless, New Labour is restless about the means for realising them. New Labour has no ideological preference for state or market and recognises state failure as well as market failure. Pursuit of our ends never meant per se the state taking up an ever larger percentage of GDP and now, given the deficit, which economic prudence and fiscal credibility demands that we tackle robustly, certainly cannot mean this.

It does mean, however, being reformers of both market and state: determined to bust cartels and to make public services truly responsive and personalised; as passionate about tackling median wage stagnation as with secondary redistribution through taxation; concerned both with competition in the banking sector and public services that deepen social capital.

We can address the connection between lack of competition in the banking sector and lack of credit for SMEs without bashing bankers. While we should be balanced in our tone and analysis, we should be radical in our policy prescriptions. But the most ground breaking policies won’t come from policy wonks like me.

If we build social capital, as far-sighted policy models like co-operative councils do, the most radical and effective policies will come from communities themselves. Unleashing this native genius and attuning ourselves to the best instincts of these communities will make us the political wing of the squeezed middle, which is what Labour needs to be to make real our values and return to government.

Manuel Valls has launched his campaign to be the presidential candidate for the French Socialist Party in 2012 with words that attractively evoke the revisionist spirits of Eduard Bernstein and Tony Crosland:

“The job of the left is not to deny the inevitable; instead, it should seek to transform every change into an opportunity to promote its values”.

French socialists have spent too long denying the inevitable. Valls is right: France’s Socialist Party must change or die. So, I wish Valls well in his candidacy.

“Equality and justice are the only ends of socialism, everything else is means”. This sentence from Roy Hattersley probably gets as close as any sentence to capturing the fundamental essence of my political beliefs. These are beliefs that stretch back to Immanuel Kant via Roy Hattersley, an acolyte of Tony Crosland, who was an advocate of the ”democratic equality” propagated by John Rawls, and Eduard Bernstein, the Marxist revision who argued that “Kant was not cant” and upon whom Crosland self-consciously modelled his thought. This constitutes a fertile heritage of moral and political philosophy on the nature of equality and justice and the application of these concepts to politics. So it came as rather a shock on Friday night to be told that I might have to liberate myself from a mental occupation by this heritage if I am to properly understand and take forward my stated objectives: equality and justice.

Alastair Crooke provided this revelation in a talk he gave to City Circle on his new book Resistance. This book argues that the heritage from which my politics flows is one in which individualism remains “the organisational principle around which society, politics and economics are organised”. My social democratic views might seek to humanise markets and the individualism upon which markets are based. But, ultimately, they accept them. In contrast, it is argued, political Islam rejects markets in favour of a world view that insists upon a primacy for “human beings behaving to one another with justice, equality and compassion”.

My objectives, therefore, parallel those of political Islam: justice and equality. However, political Islam doesn’t understand these objectives in a way that John Rawls would recognise. This divergence derives, Crooke suggests, from different conceptions of the ‘essence of man’. His book cites an Iranian cleric who says that “the message of the Iranian Revolution to today’s world lies in hoisting up the banner of the essence and the truth of man … and to show that the concepts upon which Islam is based are identical with human objectives throughout history, but from which we have diverged under the influence of the modern world”.

Just as, according to Crooke, ”the Prophet Mohammad did not see himself as founding a new religion” but, rather, providing “a ‘reminder’ of truths that everyone knew”, so too the Iranian revolution is said to be a ‘reminder’ of truths about the ‘essence of man’ that the modern world has allowed itself to forget. These truths involved “the command to build a community in which men and women behaved with compassion, with respect for others – whatever their standing in life – and in which there was a fair distribution of wealth. In short, Islam is about the experience of daily living in such a society … Muslims are commanded actively and literally to fight daily for justice and for human respect and compassion. It is the revival of this radical message of social justice that lies at the centre of the Islamic revolution”.        

In reviving this radical message, claims Crooke, the Iranian revolution stood against both the occupation of Iran by western powers and the occupation of Iranian minds by ways of thinking that the western world has produced but which have diverged from the ‘essence of man’. As a product of the west, I inevitably find this difficult to properly understand.

However, Crooke’s central argument is that this dispute about the ’essence of man’ is at the core of the conflict between Islamism and the West. When Crooke asked the Iranian cleric citied earlier about this conflict “he did not give the answer that this conflict was all about a tussle over power and sovereignty, as many westerners instinctively assume; nor did he mention foreign policy as its immediate cause; and most certainly, he did not attribute it to ‘envy’ at western ‘achievements’”. Instead, the cleric said that “what we are facing is a conflict between two civilisations; between two views about living. Recognising these two different ways of living is the main task facing us in terms of thinking and learning”.

I accept the importance of this task. Not least because conflicts are unlikely to find a happy resolution if their true causes are not properly understood. I do not accept, however, that if I should complete this task, assuming that I am able with a mind so bathed in the western world, that I will conclude that my mind has necessarily been occupied by modes of thinking that have entirely forgotten the ‘essence of man’. This would be to accept that understandings of justice and equality that derive from individual rights are alien to this essence. Thus, I would be abandoning the tradition of Kant and all that it has bequeathed, such as universal human rights as codified by the UN. This is a step far too far for someone who sees the breaches of these rights in Iran - ”torture, executions and the suppression of legitimate dissent are still being replicated in Iran”, according to Amnesty International - as being as contrary to this essence as anything that I can imagine.

Nonetheless, I look forward to completing Crooke’s book. This might be a small step towards overcoming the misunderstandings that exist between the west and the Islamic resistance. It would be wonderful to move beyond these misunderstandings to a debate about the nature of justice and equality and to means of realising these concepts. I do not presume that the tradition of Kant has a monopoly of wisdom on what is meant by these concepts but remain certain that torture, executions and the suppression of legitimate dissent are in conflict with these concepts. Any understanding of these concepts that sanctions such abuses strikes me as faulty. But, perhaps, that is just because my mind is occupied?

Or, alternatively, just as the Soviet Union didn’t reflect what Karl Marx’s thought was all about, these abuses are not what the Islamic resistance is all about? This may be so but my sense is that there is a much greater risk of such outcomes when rights are defined not on the level of the individual, as in Kant’s tradition, but on a community level, as Crooke seems to indicate is the preference of the Islamic resistance.

Crooke claims not to offer a “clash of civilisations” thesis as conclusions akin to those of the Islamic resistance do feature in western thought, particularly in the Frankfurt school. “The leaders of the Frankfurt School, like our Shi’i cleric of today” became “increasingly pessimistic … about a conversion to a different set of values achieved through critical thinking and the stimulation of the public’s critical facilities … They, like our Iranian interlocutor, disagreed with western claims for ‘modernity’ profoundly: western politics was not satisfying man’s deepest needs – far from it”.

It is striking, to me, that the Frankfurt School was born out of Karl Marx’s thought. Marx himself largely defined communism in negative terms: the absence of the exploitation and alienation that he saw as generated by capitalism. The ”false consciousness” – or mind occupation – that so concerned the Franfurt School was said to prevent this capitalist stage being overcome but, ultimately, classical Marxism argued, the tensions within capitalism were such that it had to give way to communism.

Bernstein was a revisionist in that he argued against this historic inevitability. Indeed, he argued, as Crosland later did, that capitalism had so adapted since the time of Marx that it was compatible with the values of justice and equality, which they propagated. In contrast, Marx saw morality as contingent upon the dominant class of the historical age. Therefore, Kant was not an inspiration to Marx, as he was Bernstein, so much as an articulator of the dominant bourgeoisie, individualist morality. Bernstein could compromise with the market system but Marx could not; just as Crooke claims that social democrats are defined by their compromise with the market and the Islamic resistance demands its rejection.

So: social democrats and Islamists need to debate the extent to which justice and equality can be reconciled with the market, as well as whether rights are properly defined on the level of the individual or the community. I am sure that I have much to learn from Islamic thought but I see the debate between social democrats and Islamists as replaying many of the themes that western politics and philosophy has played out over the past 200 years between the traditions that follow from Kant and those who follow from Marx. Bernstein created social democracy by moving from the later to the former camp – but in doing so reconciled himself to the market in a way that Islamists contend forgets the ‘essence of man’.

Given my call for Labour’s centre to be ideologists, I should say that it is my view that those in centre or even on the right of the party are often more ideological than can be presumed – it sometimes just doesn’t feel like it. Nonetheless, those on the left of the party would be mistaken if they, as ”the Marxists et al” of Crosland’s day may have done, conducted themselves as if they alone are the party’s ideologists. This is because this isn’t the case. Take the comment from James Purnell below, for example.

“Today’s public debate of politics is trivialised and sclerotic. When we discuss policy at all, we rarely move beyond false choices … Triangulation cuts the path to trivialisation. This is because it sets up false choices – our left wing critics would do this odd thing; our right wing critics would do this bad thing, so the only option is to do our reasonable thing. By definition, such false choices cannot be debated. Those who disagree with us do not feel we are representing their position fairly or accurately, so do not engage with our arguments. We fail to convince them when we’re right and fail to hear them when we’re wrong. The result is detachment and frustration”.

To do the “reasonable thing” is to be “mere pragmatists and administrators”, as Crosland said to Hattersley. It is only ideological debate that moves us beyond this. Both in the sense of clearly articulating what ideological ends we see policy as achieving and explaining why we see a particular policy as being the best means of achieving this ideological end. Purnell calls for a ”candid, rounded debate within the Labour Party because we face real decisions about our direction of travel”. The way we approach these choices should be ideologically driven and move us beyond the staleness of debates characterised by false choices. Such debates only lead to the kind of “detachment and frustration” which allows the left of the party to conclude that they are only ideologists in the party.

What needs to be rediscovered is the radical centre in British politics. This is what Barack Obama has really brought to the US. He is nothing if not pragmatic, which is little if not a capacity to do “reasonable things”. However, he is also undoubtedly a radical. Where the virtues of pragmatism and radicalism are fused, the radical centre is to be found. New Labour was rightly long on pragmatism but sometimes seemed too short on radicalism. The challenge for those like Purnell who wish to reinvent the New Labour project is readdress this balance.

Good post earlier this week from Danny Finkelstein:

“A very interesting comment from Pregethwr underneath my post on Labour and its leadership:

‘No Blairite seems to acknowledge, even those who were around at the time, that Blair won in 1994 with a coalition that reached deep (very deep – Peter Hain, Harriet Harman) into the soft left of the party. He won because he squeezed Robin Cook to such extent that he could have only run as the candidate of the far left and lost. No Blairite seems to want to build that coalition, they seem to want to run a ‘back me or lose’ campaign and blackmail the party into supporting them. Worked well for Ken Clarke that tactic didn’t it?’

“I am quite sympathetic to this argument.

“During the three or four years that preceded David Cameron’s election to the leadership of the Tory Party, we modernisers often discussed how we had been better at diagnosing the electoral failures of the Tory Party, and less good at analysing our own political failure to persuade the Tory Party.

“That having been said, the alliance that Tony Blair built was only possible because the soft left abandoned their position. They accepted that they had to win and were prepared to make whatever sacrifice was necessary to do that.

“I agree with Pregethwr that the Blairites need to build a broad coalition in order to win. It’s just that this may not be possible”. 

To which I replied:

“Susan Crosland’s biography of her husband records that he said to Roy Hattersley just before his death:

‘We have got to keep making the point that the far Left are not the only people that can claim a socialist theory while the rest of us are thought to be mere pragmatists and administrators. It’s not enough to disagree with the Marxists et al. The centre must remember and keep reminding people that we are ideologists too’.

“The centre of the Labour Party must again do so”.